It would take powers stranger and more awesome than even than those of Heathrow Terminal 5’s staff on opening weekend to lose the baggage accompanying Terry Gilliam’s latest fantastical film,
The Imaginarium Of Doctor Parnassus. The picture itself doesn’t even begin to try: dedicated to the memory of actor Heath Ledger and producer William Vince, both of whom died in 2008, this is black border cinema.
The set-up is the stuff of fairytale, dumped unceremoniously in grimy contemporary London. Dr Parnassus (Christopher Plummer) is a man with a magic mirror which provides a gate into a realm of imagination and fantasy. He travels in an old time fairground wagon containing the mirror and his small band of followers: his daughter Valentina (Lily Cole), her would-be boyfriend Anton (Andrew Garfield) and truculent small person Percy (Verne Troyer).
In hot pursuit is the film’s most engaging character, Mr Nick, a part not so much played as intensely relished by Tom Waits. In film, much like music, the devil gets all the best parts. This bowler-hatted Beelzebub and his sleazy pencil moustache have come to claim the fruit of a wager made by Parnassus that means the lovely Valentina is soon to become Mrs Nick, thus providing the film’s main narrative spur. Incidentally, the laws governing soul ownership are surely due an overhaul; it’s a grotesque anachronism in the legal system that a boozy dad can gamble away his daughter’s soul without her knowledge or consent.
Said cavalier attitude and an ongoing self-pitying tendency mean that Dr Parnassus is not a desperately sympathetic character, despite his alignment with the forces of imagination and old-fashioned story craft. A King Lear figure once proud and powerful, by the time we meet the good doctor, he’s dwindled into a poor old man, as full of grief as age, and wretched in both, but as bloody minded as ever. Like Lear, he sees himself as more sinned against than sinning, but it doesn’t really wash, and so Gilliam must conjure a more definite sinner as a foil. Enter Heath Ledger.
Ledger as Tony is an apparently charming amnesiac found hanging inauspiciously from a noose under a bridge above the Thames. He might claim to know nothing about his own clearly dodgy past (emphasised by dodgy geezer accent) but he’s certain he has the remedy for Parnassus’ flailing act, and it’s really this battle which is the heart of the film. Dr Parnassus lacks the glib and oily art that Tony has in buckets: the gift of the gab. Tony outlines his feelings on the current act in a speech that cannot be anything but a coalescence of studio doublethink and criticism of Gilliam over the years: that he needs to attract a different kind of audience, “a better audience”, that he needs to “think bigger” – make things more colourful, but at the same time, less colourful. Suspicious of showmanship and profiteering but feeling necessity’s sharp pinch, Dr Parnassus allows Tony to perform a spot of ‘Changing Rooms’ magic on his act, and despite the fact that (unlike certain of Gilliam’s unhappier productions) it works, clearly regrets it.
This sense of regret and loss over the cheapening of his act might feel more poignant in a production less genuinely soaked in these emotions. Sensibly, there is no attempt to ignore Ledger’s untimely death, and nor does the triple act of Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell who step into play Tony in the imaginarium feel like an attempt to mask his death, literally or figuratively – in their matching suits, they are more like mourners. Depp gets a scene standing beside a river as miniature boats bearing images of the young dead, including Marilyn Monroe and Rudolph Valentino, float by, and he eulogises them as never growing old or ugly, weak or feeble.
It’s one of several moments that risks being crass but isn’t – it is too obviously sincere. Parnassus is a film that never lacks sincerity – sincerity and the holiness of imagination are Gilliam’s guiding lights. If this was all we required from cinema, Parnassus would be a masterpiece. Unfortunately, artistic integrity alone too easily flounders.
The vacuum at the heart of Parnassus is a sense of urgency. It rolls along, a ragged stately galleon, ornate, intriguing, but lacking a driving force. Ledger’s death may have taken the wind out of the production’s sails, entirely understandably, but that doesn’t explain the at times drifting quality of the narrative prior to that particular tragedy. Dr Parnassus in particular does not behave like a man whose teenage daughter is at very real risk of being taken away by the devil for presumably nefarious purposes.
On the set of 2005’s The Brothers Grimm, Gilliam would reportedly bury himself in the details of production design – delighted to get something just as he’d imagined – even as the production went over budget and the wicked Weinsteins breathed fire down his neck. The Imaginarium is fantasy to its core, but it is also an autobiography.
